Canada and the international coalition have relied heavily on air strikes to support Kurdish peshmerga fighters combatting the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham in Iraq, but this hasn’t addressed the group’s most lethal tactic - National Post

The nucleus of the city is a citadel rising 30 metres above the plains. The height represents the accretion of eight millenia of human settlement, making it perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited place on Earth. Until recently the city wasn’t much more than that — an isolated economic backwater - National Post